Reading Paranoia XP: Criminal Histories

Back with another review of an old RPG book. If that interests you, check it out, otherwise feel free to skip it.

This time, I’m looking at the Criminal Histories sourcebook for the Paranoia XP line.

As I said in my last review of a Paranoia XP book—The Mutant Experience—the supporting material for the XP line falls into a couple of broad categories: adventures, and expanded character options and setting material. Bill O’Dea’s Criminal Histories (cowritten with members of the “Traitor Recycling Studio”1) falls into the second camp, specifically providing a new character-generation system for Troubleshooters. 

Yeah, you read that right: it’s a complete alternate chargen system, integrating material from previous supporting supplements like Extreme Paranoia, Service Service!, and The Mutant Experience (though it’s carefully designed to be useable without those books). 

This alternate chargen system is a little nuts: it provides you with the means of generating characters with a history of crimes and treasons, some contacts and enemies, modified or specialized skill ratings and options, and even a different starting clone number. (The back cover copy makes a reference to the infamous Traveler character generation minigame, in which player characters could die before the generation process finished, quipping that Paranoia characters can die multiple times before the character generation process is complete.)

The centerpiece of the book is Chapters 2 and 3 (“Tell Us About Yourself!” and “Prehistory Pachinko.” These two chapters are mostly a massive series of tables, and make up essentially the character-generation equivalent of the famous and beloved “Mission Blender” included with the Paranoia XP GM screen. The joke on the first page of Chapter 3, about rolling a d20 seventy-five times, isn’t really all that far off: it’s the kind of thing I think, in 2018, would be likelier implemented as an online, bonus character generator supplement or something. (Automating this alternate chargen system is actually the kind of mini-project that attracts me, somehow: I’d love to see that expanded character data neatly input into a form-fillable PDF in Arial 11-point font.)

One reason a software implementation of it would be good is because, honestly, the tables are linked together in weird, criss-crossing progressions that are almost Kafkaesque in complexity. I don’t actually mean that in a bad way: as a character-generation minigame, there’s something charmingly Paranoia-like about the process of rolling on a table on page 23, being directed to roll on another table by a different name (but no page reference: you have to check the index on first page of the section to see where to roll), and then rolling there, get directed to another table, then back to an earlier one, and then forward again. If you were a GM doing this with a group of players, you’d want multiple copies of the book (or at least of the section) so that it wouldn’t take all night… though, actually, I can imagine someone doing up a hypertext series of tables where you roll and then click to get directed to the next table. 

That said, I would probably want to fully automate as much of it as possible for the sake of saving time. After all, RPG sessions are hard-won from other time-consuming commitments, and Paranoia characters don’t tend to live that long anyway. Sitting with a group of players as they rolled through the Prehistory Pachinko tables four times (or more) each isn’t the way I’d ever spend a full gaming session, though an automated character generator that automated the rolling… that I could get behind. 

That said, it is a fun book, and the process does feel a bit like how I imagine doing paperwork in Alpha Complex would be: not a matter of a simple form so much as a matter of highly conditional, unpredictable, and always-changing redirection and extra tasks and questions and so on. That sounds like faint praise, but I think the characters one would create using this system are likely to be more interesting and flavorful than a plain-vanilla Paranoia XP character… and as one of those old-schoolish people, a book crammed with tables upon tables actually appeals to me—especially if they’re fun to read, and the tables in the Prehistory Pachinko section make an effort to be amusing even if you’re just skimming them. 

As for me, I’d be unlikely to use the book with dice and pen-and-paper, but I can easily see myself automating the process in this book as a project, even if just for the sake of figuring out the algorithm I could use to run the through the tables as written. (Including a variation that would allow players to select tics or type in their own, as well as a fully-automated Pregen Party mode.)

Oh, and I don’t mean to give short shrift to the rest of the book: the “character” kits in the first chapter hilariously and brilliantly lampoon “builds” and “character kits” in that other “not-fun” RPG, providing not munchkin-fodder but rather more ways for player characters to be inept, ridiculous, and horrible. I love it. The end sections—”Chapter 4: Your Old Job” and “Chapter Five: Your New Job”—feel a bit overlong and the latter feels slightly superfluous. After all, Chapter 4 mainly explains stuff about Service Groups that I suspect a lot of groups playing Paranoia informally didn’t bother too much with anyway—but, you know, for those who were very familiar with the game, it’s more added spice. As for Chapter 5, it explains what a lot of experienced players probably already know about Troubleshooting, though it does detail some methods of training used at Alpha Complex—and those training methods hook into the Prehistory Pachinko tables, which is a nice bonus. That said, whether or not you get use out of them in-game, the humor is clearly spot-on for Paranoia, and I enjoyed reading it. I do think it definitely could be useful in helping generate more rounded (if still insane) characters for a “Straight” mode game, if that’s what you’re after… and that, I think, is one of the strengths of the XP game line: it supports multiple modes of play. 

(One reason I’m hesitant about the newer version of the game is that it feels more like it’s designed for Zap, with Classic Paranoia being possible but not the natural mode of the game. I’m very curious, but I like the XP game so much I’d almost rather hack in elements from the new system into the XP system, such as cards. Others have done this, after all, to putatively good effect. Also, like Paul Baldowski, I’ve kind of been curious about what it’d be like to hack Legacy: Life Among the Ruins for an Alpha Complex-like setting, with “families” being replaced by Service Groups and characters being linked to the former, as well as to Secret Societies. I don’t think Baldowski ever got around to it, but since it’s an idea I arrived at myself as soon as I looked into Legacy, it can’t be that bad a concept.)

Since this book is in itself basically an alternate char-gen system, I thought I’d do up a character using it, and see what I get. (Yeah, this is kind of inspired some of those blogs out there where the authors create characters as part of a review or examination of a given RPG system. (I have a specific one in mind but can’t find it now, sadly.)

Here’s what I came up with, using the method where you keep running the Prehistory Pachinko routine until your character gets promoted to Red Clearance (click to download the filled-out PDF, or just view the file below):

I’ll emphasize first that I was quite lucky overall: choosing the “That Quiet Neighbour” kit gave my character some useful Violence, Stealth, and Wetware scores and Specialties, and the Prehistory Pachinko runs I did (I think it took about eight or nine runs before he ended up Red Clearance) mostly came out positive for him, with the exception of that nasty incident involving a higher-ranking former member of his secret society (PURGE, well, sort-of: that’s his cover, but he’s really an infiltrator from another Alpha Complex). 

(Oh, and I didn’t bother purchasing gear, since I was interested in seeing what gear he’d end up with prior to that stage, just on the basis of the character generation system alone. Presumably the character would also have a laser blaster and some horrible assigned equipment from R&D as well.)

I can say, wholeheartedly, that I think the Criminal Histories supplement does add some fun and worthwhile stuff to the character-generation process. That said, I’m not sure how much of it would really register for a newbie player: this is another of those supplements you’d want to add into the mix once your players are used to Paranoia XP, as a way of spicing things up and shifting gears on them, and I think especially for “Straight” mode games, it’d be a cool way of adding in secrets, conspiracies, and treasons right from the beginning of the game. 

That said, it’s an involved process, and I think the best way to put it to use would be to automate it: that is, to create computer code that collate and print-to-PDF the results of the Prehistory Pachinko routine and more. I’m not quite up to that level of skill yet, but I did at least get a chance to make a form-fillable version of the Criminal Histories character sheet, since I couldn’t find one online. Here it is:

• Paranoia XP – Criminal Histories Character Sheet-formfillable.pdf

Note that the sheet is from the book, and widely available online. All I’ve done is made a form-fillable version, which would be a prerequisite for making software that could automatically fill it out for a player, effectively creating pregen characters on the fly. 

For those who like doing things the older-fashioned way, here’s the standard character sheet in PDF form:

• Paranoia XP – Criminal Histories Character Sheet.pdf